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Vendor Profile: Aventyn tackles mobile health on two fronts

By Eric Wicklund, Editor, mHIMSS
WASHINGTON – With the launch of a new cloud-based solution for hospitals and a study focused on the use of remote patient monitoring solutions on heart failure patients on three continents, Aventyn is celebrating a busy holiday season.

The Carlsbad, Calif.-based company made the two announcements at last week's mHealth Summit in Washington D.C., where officials were promoting the their inclusion in Qualcomm Life's new 2net network. According to company founder and CEO Navin Govind, the announcements mark Aventyn's strong interest into two different facets of mobile health technology.

The new solution, CLIP Care Cloud, is a cloud-based solution for hospitals and patient point-of-care services that gives RFID capabilities to the company's CLIP Clinical Information Processing Platform. Available as part of the Intel AppUp Small Business Service, it's designed to allow clinicians to access medical records and billing systems, allowing for remote document management, ePrescription and ePedigree access and telemedicine solutions, among others.

"Clinical information systems based on the Intel AppUp Small Business Service delivered on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform are precisely the kind of health IT solutions that providers are benefitting from by improving healthcare delivery and patient safety," Govind said in a press release announcing the product launch. "A simple, flexible and cost-effective solution that can scale and be instantly available is now a reality for delivering effective healthcare."

At the same time, Aventyn is providing its Vitalbeat Integrated Chronic Disease Management software and CareLock health information security and wireless biosensor system to the Remote-HF-1 Mobile Heart Failure clinical study, in which heart failure patients are provided mobile smartphone devices to continuously monitor their vital signs, and their physicians and study coordinators are given tablet computers to track and manage the patients.

According to Govind, Vitalbeat captures the patient's vital signs via bio-sensors and makes them available in real-time to physicians.

"The Phase I primary objective is to evaluate the specially designed patient adherence and monitoring software Vitalbeat on standard mobile devices in terms of its reliability, seamless data transmission and early data availability to the physician to improve patient physician interaction," said Satish Govind, MD, PhD, of the Vivus-BMJ Heart Center in Bangalore, India, one of the study's two core principal investigators, in a press release.

"We are additionally assessing patient response to use of mobile device monitoring, patient self-monitoring skills and physician response to transmitted patient data using smartphone, tablet devices and wearable Holter monitors," added Marcus Stahlberg, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska University Hospital at Solna in Stockholm, Sweden, the other core principal investigator. "This is a unique opportunity to practically observe the pattern of use of mobile device monitoring across representative and geographically diverse populations in a multi-center, multinational setting."

The first phase of the study involves 65 patients at five centers – the Vivus-BMJ Heart Center and Narayana Hrudayalaya Heart Hospital, both in Bangalore, Karolinska University Hospital at Solna in Stockholm, Saint Francis Hospital in Roslyn, N.Y., and Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. Collaborating in the study are the BMS Hospital Trust in India, AT&T Healthcare, the University of North Carolina and Zephyr Technology.

According to officials, Phase II of the trial, planned for 2012, will last two years and include a larger patient enrollment, more sophisticated sensors, pharmacotherapy and improved medication adherence and secure cloud data sharing for managing long-term preventive and wellness programs.

According to Aventyn officials, there have been few studies that combine mobile health technology with heart failure patients, which accounts for 500,000 to 900,000 new cases each year and causes 200,000 deaths and 1 million hospitalizations among Medicare patients. According to the Cleveland Clinic, 27 percent of heart failure patients are re-admitted to the hospital within 30 days of discharge, and more than half of that percentage is re-admitted within the year, at a cost to the system of $20 billion.

"The attraction of mobile technology is that it is already generally available in established and developing markets and can be implemented with minimal additional cost to the patient (using the patient's own mobile device) or the care provider. User-friendly software, instantaneous access to clinical information on a continuous basis and quick response to alerts could translate into reducing morbidity/mortality and reduce the burden on many fronts," officials said in a press release.